Intel releases x86 system image for Android 4.0

When developing Android apps, or just evaluating the features of a new software build, it doesn’t always make sense to load the bits onto a physical device. That’s what desktop emulators are good for. Because mobile devices and desktop PCs are running such different hardware, emulation has been sluggish until now. Intel has, at long last, released an x86 system image for the emulator. That far-off cheer you’re hearing is the sound of every Android developer on Earth celebrating.

The bottom line here is that with a real x86 system image, the emulator will no longer be dog slow. Android devices run on the ARM architecture with chips from the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia. Your desktop PC, however, uses the x86 architecture with an Intel or AMD chip. The overhead in emulating the ARM environment on x86 causes numerous bugs.

As devices have scaled up to 720p and beyond, it has become near impossible to use the emulator. The more pixels you need to push, the slower things are. This has made developing for tablets extremely slow. In fact, many developers have just taken to installing test builds on physical devices instead of emulating.

The new system image is available in the Android SDK Manager and is based on Android 4.0.3, which is the version of Ice Cream Sandwich Google has seeded to OEMs. Just refresh the SDK packages if you have it installed, and the Intel system image should be under API level 15. Anyone that’s looking to do some development for one of the upcoming Intel-based Android devices will also have an easier time working out the kinks with this system image.